Distinguished Researcher, Institute of Social History “Valentín de Foronda”- University of the Basque Country 

• Email: psleon@fcsh.unl.pt
• ORCID: 0000-0003-0038-0413

My research profile can be summarized as that of a specialist in transition periods: from the Middle Ages to Early Modern history, from the Old Regime to Liberalism, and from dictatorship to democracy. Throughout my career I have been trained in different social sciences and methods of the humanities, becoming a highly versatile researcher in terms of historical periods of research and interdisciplinarity, which I practice motivated by responding to current theoretical and current methodological issues. My concern for approaching knowledge of the past in complex multicultural societies following the crisis of the idea of progressive future has led me to develop a whole design of how to “thinking historically” about timely problems.

I have been a predoctoral researcher at the CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) and a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA, the Autonomous University of Madrid, and the Carlos III University of Madrid. I has also been a professor at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid and a visiting professor at Sabanci University (Istanbul, Turkey). I worked as a researcher at the University of the Basque Country from 2010 to 2018, and from 2018 to 2024 at the CHAM Humanities Center at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, where I coordinated the cross-cutting research line "Theory and Methodology”. I also coordinate the network Rioting! with Professor Pedro Cardim, which brings together more than 70 specialists in revolts and riots in the Iberian empires between the 16th and 19th centuries.

I am the author of the monograph Popular Political Participation and the Democratic Imagination in Spain, 1766-1868. From Crowd to People (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020). I have also co-edited with Benita Herreros the collective volume Resistance in the Iberian Worlds from the Fifteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. Dissent and Disobedience from Within (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2024) and another collective volume co-edited with Agustín Cosovschi entitled, European Perspectives on Transition: A Comparative and Transnational Approach to an Axial Political and Social Concept (Berhahn Books, 2025).

I'm also interested in developing alternative narrative frameworks about modernization and the traumatic past. I'm the editorial director of Postmetropolis and coordinate the blog "El león dormido… despierta” [The Sleeping Lion... Awakens], both on the themes of history and memory.